Monday, March 22, 2010

Ezra Klein is taking questions today about the bill that passed the House last night. If you want to know how health care reform is actually going to work, I strongly suggest going over there to read what he has to say. The truth is that everyone who is interested in understanding the substance of health care reform owes an enormous debt to Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, both of whom have been absolutely essential guides to understanding the policy.

Meanwhile, he's inspired me: while he's doing the policy, if you have any questions about the politics of health care reform, past, present, or future, I'll give it a try. Leave them in comments here, or email me. I haven't tried one of these before, and it could be that everyone is sick of the politics of health care reform (and I obviously don't have nearly the number of readers that he has!), but I'll see how it goes. So, what do you want to know?

David Gregory held up public opinion on the stimulus yesterday to point out that the Democrats' expectation that heath care reform gets more popular over time might not be true, at least in the short term. That the stimulus is almost universally praised by economists and only unpopular because of massive demagoguery by the Republicans abetted by his colleagues seemed lost on Gregory, but this is MTP we're talking about, so what can you do?

What do you think? Are the situations analogous? What happens with public opinion over the next few months? And for that matter, is the stimulus a net positive come November?

Is a major bill passing like a big software launch? With software you always have version 1.1 coming out soon after 1.0. Will Congress have to pass a lot of little bills in the near future? What's the politics of that?

I think the GOP gave the Democrats a gift by not giving them even one vote on the final bills. It makes for a nice, neat campaign attack line: "EVERY Republican sided with the insurance companies and against health security for you and your family." And now they've given the Dems another gift by promising repeal. Attack line: "A vote for my Republican opponent is a vote to go back to letting insurance companies decide whether you and your children get health care." Do you agree? Granting that there are variations among districts and races, do you think Democrats would, in general, be well-served by pressing these attacks this fall and in 2012?

What do you expect the average Democrat's platform on health care to be in the future? Is the issue going to sit on the back burner for a while before the next steps are taken, or is something like campaigning on the public option going to become an immediate feature of Democratic campaigns?

I'm also wondering what you think the effects of this recent struggle will be, institutionally, on the Congress and how it operates. What lessons will congressional leaders draw from it that might affect how they approach their jobs in the future? And will D and R leaders (or the leaders of the two Houses) draw similar or different conclusions from it?

How would things be different if Coakley had won the special election in MA? The bill would have likely taken a more straightforward, predictable path to enactment, and of course the final bill would have differed than the one we have now, because with 60 votes in the Senate, the two chambers would have been able to negotiate freely rather than having to take the more restricted "reconciliation" route.

But I wonder if the political shock of the bill's resurrection from seeming death may have helped the Democrats in unexpected ways. It certainly was a juicier, more exciting outcome.

So my two questions are: (1) If Coakley had won, how would the final bill have differed? (2) Would the Democrats be in a better or worse position than they are now? Why or why not?

David Frum's post has been going around the blogosphere since last night, saying in a nutshell that talk radio and fox news has gotten a groundswell of support for the party-but done so in a way that makes it impossible to work with democrats at all which will end up hurting the party. Do you think that this radicalization will continue or will the party come to its senses? I'm as liberal as they come, but if the Republican response to a bill with a public option(I agree with you it seems inevitable) is screams of "death panels" and "socialism" instead of policy analysis, its bad for everybody.